I recently started reading a book called Storyworthy. It is written by Matthew Dicks, an award winning storyteller. He has won many moth story grand slams in his years telling stories. This book is essentially his 8 hour training session for storytelling compressed into a book.

Relentless

If you go to relentless.com right now, it will take you to amazon.com. One of the first names that Jeff Bezos thought of for his company was relentless because it embodied the spirit he wanted the company to have.

Matthew Dicks offers up a wide variety of tools that one can use to start telling better stories. I'll go through a couple of these tools that he mentions below, but the main thing that I got from both of these tools is that if you want to really be a great storyteller, if you want to have more stories in your database then you can ever tell in a lifetime, you have to be relentless in your pursuit of story.

I haven't read the full book yet, in fact I'm only a few chapters in, but the main theme I'm getting so far is that stories are all around us, we just have to be on the lookout for them. We can't let them pass by. We have to open our eyes and connect the dots.

He mentions one story where he's picking up his nine year old daughter and even though his body is starting to hurt he decides to carry her up the stairs. His body begins to wear out and he starts putting her down and she says, its nice to be held this close. So he holds on to that moment and holds her in his arms for a few minutes. Realizing that now that she's so big, he is the only one that still picks her up. He mentions that if he had not been in this constant state of trying to find moments, this moment would have just passed by just like any other moment. He would not have thought about how no one else picks her up anymore. He probably would have just put her down at that moment. Understanding our own stories, being able to connect the dots of our experiences gives us a better understanding of ourselves.

Story Database

For a long time, I've wanted to have a story database. Something I can quickly reference to remember stories. The issue I have is that I'll have stretches where I'm around people and I'm telling a lot of stories, then for weeks I wont say a single story. My storytelling skills get real rusty. I have considered ideas for how to create this database of stories a few times. My first solution to this was to create a podcast with my friend Momo where we just relate stories. We titled the audio files with the story names so we can easily reference them.

This idea was good in theory, but it required too much effort to even start. To start, we need to have both me and Momo in the same room for at least an hour. In the early years of college, this was a quite simple ask, but now that he and I are both working and busy with our own lives, it is almost impossible.

I realized I couldn't depend on someone else, so I decided to start journaling daily again. During my travels, my journal was where i kept all my stories. Oftentimes even today I will go back through my travel journal and just reminisce on the stories that took place. During my travels every day was something new and i made special time to journal so i really found a lot of benefit in journaling. During the work week, i just felt that something was different when i was journaling. It was like I was just doing it to say I did it. My heart wasn't in it. I think this was because i told myself I need to finish a page every day. So instead of filling the page with useful story, I would end up just writing some gibberish to fill the page. Sure, there were some good entries, a lot of good lessons that I wrote down. But if we look at the vast majority of the journal entries that I have written when not traveling, there really isn't much substance there.

Then came this storyworthy book. Matthew Dicks recommended taking 5 minutes of your day, and just thinking: what was a storyworthy moment that happened today. And in a few words just writing it down on a spreadsheet. Not more than a sentence. Just enough so you remember what happened and can recall that story. It has only been a few days since I started this, but this is a lot more sustainable than the other things that I've tried. For someone that just wants to be a good storyteller as a hobby, this is the perfect action to take to keep the storytelling skills fresh while not spending too much time sitting there trying to fill a page. For perspective, here was my entry from yesterday: Gopi cadillac nice on outside, battery not working, doesn't serve purpose. This was easy enough to input into my notion database, and its enough to remember what happened.

Dreaming at the End of Your Pen

Another exercise that the author mentions is essentially writing everything that comes to your mind. You don't let the pen stop. Even if you're in the middle of an idea and another one comes, you go where your mind takes you.

The author shares an example of him doing it in the book. When he said leave a though mid thought he wasn't lying. I was a bit shocked. He didn't even complete the sentences. There were legit no rules except that you write down everything that comes to your mind. As a result, at the end of the 5 minute word vomit session he had, he was able to find 5 stories that he hadn't even thought about in years.

This exercise takes a bit longer than the first, but its the natural next step if you're actually trying to find old stories and connections.